Tag Archives: Extended World Travel

Yes, we’re hiking around in new territory again. Not physically though (well, not by foot anyway).

We’re working on our first real book! Of course it’s about traveling – extended travel. Actually it’s a development of our e-book: “Extended World Travel – How to take a break from the rat race and travel the world with your family for 6 months – or more” and it will be out soon!!

We haven’t been too active with our blog lately, and this is the reason. We’re also starting to do talks soon here in Sweden. That’s also a totally new track for us and we’re very excited!

At the moment, most of our time goes into book editing and preparing slide shows and talks and we’ve spent lots of time lately looking at old paper photos and not so old digital photos. I thought I’d post a few of them here.

I must say, working with this, and looking at all the photos, brings back so many memories, as well a reminder of how quickly times goes. The kids are almost adults now and I’m so grateful for having been able to spend so much time together with them and to travel around the world as a family. We’ll have all those memories together, I’m sure (and of course, the photos )

They say that if you have a really strong why, the how will very much sort itself out.

Of course you can apply this for traveling as well. If you’re very clear about why you want to do that 6 (or 3 or 12) months trip, you can be sure to start finding solutions to obstacles that stand in the way between you and your journey. Some questions you can ask yourself to strengthen your why are:

•What specifically motivates you to do some long term traveling? When you think about traveling, what is it that makes your heart beat a little faster?

•What do you want to experience?

•What do you see your trip to lead to?

•Who do you want to be when you get back?

•What is your biggest motivation to travel?

Contemplate this for a while and get yourself a really strong why!

They say that if you have a really strong why, the how will very much sort itself out.

Of course you can apply this for traveling as well. If you’re very clear about why you want to do that 6 (or 3 or 12) months trip, you can be sure to start finding solutions to obstacles that stand in the way between you and your journey. Some questions you can ask yourself to strengthen your why are:

•What specifically motivates you to do some long term traveling? When you think about traveling, what is it that makes your heart beat a little faster?

•What do you want to experience?

•What do you see your trip to lead to?

•Who do you want to be when you get back?

•What is your biggest motivation to travel?

Contemplate this for a while and get yourself a really strong why!

We dreamt about Fiji, and made a reality of that dream – how about you?

When you’re considering taking some time off and go traveling the world for longer periods, months or even years, here are 10 advices we’d like to give you.

1. Have everything taken care of at home

Have everything taken care of before you leave, your home, car, pets, bills….Don’t drag your everyday stuff and concerns with you on your trip.

2. Leave home at home

Having things taken care of at home makes it easier to let go of all that and be present in your journey. So you can just immerse yourself with all the new along the way. You’re supposed to be here now, not there!

Since you've got the time now, make sure all the travelers in your group can have their needs met. Maybe playing in the sand for a couple of days (weeks?) is important for some...

3. Take your time

Chances are you are living a pretty hectic life normally, at home. Don’t bring that stressful pace on the trip! It may take a while before you can get rid of it (usually a few weeks) but when you start to relax, stay in that state and experience the world from there.

4. Plan according to the traveler’s ages

Are you traveling with babies, teenagers or both? Take your time to figure out how you can make your journey so that every body’s needs are met, and don’t forget your own!

5. Don’t cram too much “doing” into your trip

There’s this belief that you always have to “do” things for things to happen. Rest assure, when you’re traveling for months, or more, things will undoubtedly turn up and give you opportunities to experience interesting things and adventure. So, try to give the “being” a bit focus too.

6. Be open to changing plans along the way

Even if you have your plans, maybe you actually didn’t know what you really wanted to do or where you wanted to go when you were at home. Or maybe something totally unexpected turned up along the way, a different situation or a new idea. Don’t be afraid to change your plans and follow new roads. That’s what traveling is all about.

7. Stay in the present

Experience what’s here and now. Look around. Listen. See. Try to be HERE and not there, at your next destination, tomorrow, next week, or back home again. Remember, the more you’re here, the more you’ll experience (and it doesn’t have to be “big” things).

8. Respect and try to have a true interest in the people and the customs of the places you are passing along your journey

Also remember, most people are usually more interested in being genuinely listened to than to listen to you (although sharing about your country and your customs of course is part of it).

9. Forget the “my country is the best in the world” mentality.

Even if that’s what you’re thinking, at least before you set of on your long trip, strive for seeing positive and interesting things with every place you’re visiting. What can you learn from people and places that you can bring home and make your own place even better? And what can you share with them that can make their place even better as well?

10. Embrace challenges and see them as part of your trip (or maybe even as the purpose of it).

When you’re traveling long term, challenges turn up. You can choose not to see them as difficulties though, but as opportunities to grow. And surely, these situations will be some of the things you and your family/co-travelers will remember the best and that will help create that strong bond between you. So embrace your learning opportunities!

How does one get the money top travel long term? Or like a recent question that we got from a German lady who wrote:

“I love the idea of getting out of the rat race and spend my whole life travelling. But there will be food and gas that I have to buy. Where do I take the money from, when I’m not working?”

It is a very easy question to ask but much more complex to answer. It really depends on a lot of factors and your personal situation.
We are all unique with unique talents living our own unique lives. Therefore there is not one answer available that suites all. And as long as you are hoping for someone to give you the one and only answer you run a big risk of being disappointed. What works for us may be impossible for you or the other way round.

A very sad thing we have noticed through the years when we’ve been asked these question, is that our answers may even be more discouraging than encouraging. We can literally see the light and hope vanish from people’s eyes as they hear our answer and they often say something like: “Well we can’t do that”. They take our answer as the only way and then they use it as a reason to why it is not possible for them to do it.

And this happens no matter what our answers have been. Through the years our circumstances have been varying and accordingly so have our solutions been different to how we have made it possible to travel.

It is very important to us to do our best to support anyone who has a desire to go on a long journey. All our long journeys have been extremely rewarding to us and we wish that more could have a similar experience. That is basically why we started writing a book and also this website in the first place.

So nowadays we are very careful to offer quick solutions that have worked for us. We believe it is much more helpful if we can support, encourage and inspire you to find the quick solution that is tailor made for you.

To do that you will basically have to take a look at your own situation and also what you want your extended journey to look at.

We have met so many long term travelers through the years. From the wealthy ones, who stays in hotels and eats in restaurants every night to those traveling on a very limited budget and gets away with spending less money than at home. Yet others even make money traveling and can literally return home to a bigger bank account than they had when they left. Actually, money doesn’t have to be a problem after all… Even if you doubt this we are convinced that it is definitely a possibility for you to.

Someone said:

” You don’t need money to make money – you need creativity”.

We would change that to:

“You don’t need money to travel around the world – you need creativity”.

Our book: Extended World Travel is our attempt to, in the best way possible, support you to create the dream trip of your life, the perfect journey that suites your personal circumstances.

For you who are really determined to make your trip happen and are interested in getting some extra support, Maria will soon start to offer travel coaching. This will of course for natural reasons be a very limited offer and only on a first comes first serve basis. If you want to you can express your interest in an email to Maria at maria@extendedworldtravel.com .

Well I don’t know about you, but for me this happens now and then. Suddenly I can find myself in a situation where things aren’t working anymore and the need to change my life starts popping into my mind.Even if you live your dream life these feelings can come up, and probably will sooner or later. It even happens to millionaires… And it does occur, I believe, because time passes and you and the world change over time. Things start out just perfect and then after a while your feelings about things change.

It can be your favorite music that after listening to it for years and years just doesn’t give you the same thrill as it once did. You or the circumstances have changed whereas the music is most likely still the same.

This can also happened in a relationship. It starts out just perfect with love and passion but when time passes and routine takes over it might not feel that perfect any more.

Or it may happen in your family life. Your lovely little family may have turned into a source of stress and uncomfortable feelings for you. And that’s so sad because it should really be a source of joy and happiness.

For a lot of people, their work definitely creates those “I want to change my life” feelings. Your work may have started out just fine or even great but over time it has a tendency to turn into something mundane. This happens when time pass and you change or the work assignment stays the same.

Well, whatever is the reason for the need to “change my life” is not that important. What’s important is that the feeling is there, and what you do about it. And we’re not talking about a small downturn in your mood but rather something that is a more permanent feeling.

A common way that most of us tend to choose first is to try and endure it and hope for it to improve or go away. It works in the short run but for a feeling that comes back again and again it’s usually not enough and there’s a need for a dramatic change of some kind. A boring job seldom turns into something exciting and inspiring.

What has happened to us personally when we have run into this state, is that we have managed to take off on some extended journey. At first this was more of a coincidence, but we then realized that we can use this when we feel stuck and need a major change. And it has created a complete shift for us more than once.

The people we were who took off on these long term journeys have been completely different from the ones that came back. The journeys themselves and the time away from the life that were stressing us have given us the possibility to take a huge step in discovering and realizing our new dreams and visions.

These experiences from our extended journeys are some of the reasons we’ve put up this blog. We’ve met so many people who feel stuck in their lives and who have a desire to change. And the best technique we know of for creating change is to go on an extended journey.

There are of course lots of other techniques out there and we have tried some of them too. But to us, the power of traveling outweighs them by far. If you have a desire to create a lasting change in your life our recommendation is to try long term traveling. It will change your life forever!

There always seem to be something stopping us from going on that long term journey. For some of the families we meet, the reason is that their children are too young. “It will be better when the kids are older and can manage more by themselves and will be old enough to enjoy the experience”. Ironically though, for the next family we encounter the reason can be quite the opposite, that the kids are too old. “They have their school work and their friends which they don’t want to leave”.

Writing in the olive tree in Spain

For us personally, school has never been an issue since we’ve been homeschooling. Well, that is not perfectly true. At the time of our first long term journey, our oldest daughter, Viktoria, was actually attending school and it was a bit of an issue for her to leave her friends there.

For us the parents, it was a surprise to be confronted with what power the idea of schooling has over our society. When we told the teacher that we were taking Viktoria out of school to go on a 6 month journey, we were told that we needed his as well as the school boards permission! Realizing that the school authorities could claim to overrule our decision was chocking to us. How ignorant we were…

Anyway, what was more interesting for us during that first long term journey, was the possibility we got to compare class learning to real life learning. Like most people we were convinced that school was something that everyone had to go through in order to learn anything. We had never even really questioned the fact that learning was something that had to be done in a school setting, more or less.

That first long term journey changed it all for us. Just to witness all the fantastic learning that happened was an awakening for us. All the different languages, cultures, climate, nature, wildlife, distances, currencies, exchange rates, social behaviors and lots of other things. And all the different people we met and their varying customs we experienced was definitely a crash course in socialization.

Who says you have to be sitting in a room on a chair to study? The options are endless, reading in a pool in Fiji for instance.

The biggest insight for us though, was when we got back home and Viktoria returned to her school. We then realized, that while Viktoria and our whole family had been out exploring and learning in the world, her classmates had spent all their time in the same class room. That’s when it became clear to us how limited the school world can be and that was when we started our search for something else.

We are not saying that homeschooling, our choice, is the right way for everybody. But we do believe that school by no means should be an obstacle for taking your children for a long term journey and exploring the world. The question is not if you dare to take them on this adventure but rather if you dare not to.

Taking Viktoria out of school at that time impacted our lives and our whole way of living. We’re very glad we did it and grateful for having had the opportunity to do it. To travel as a family is a fantastic way of connecting and of learning and we just wish and hope more families could experience this.

Traveling is and has been a very big part of our family’s life. As a result of that, we have also always been interested to look for different ways to create money in more “unconventional” ways.

With T Harv Eker at the Millionaire Mind in Seattle 2004

The thought of going somewhere, somewhere new, is almost always present in all of us. Well, actually, today we don’t think about traveling as something “exotic” or as some “once in a lifetime” event. Nowadays it’s just a natural part of our life.

We have become very much world citizens. We have our home base in Sweden, but we feel very much like the world is our home.

Through the years, our lifestyle has become more and more “independent” (in the meaning of not having to be in one special place to work, to go to school, to follow the main stream or do what everybody else does). Our lifestyle has evolved over the years thanks to many things.

One challenge we (too) have faced is the financial one. We’ve had our ups and downs and we’ve had, and still have, much focus on creating a “stable” relationship with money.

One of our big breakthroughs in this area came when we participated in a seminar in Seattle some years ago (the whole family, of course) – The Millionaire Mind Intensive. 3 days of working with the mental issues of money and transforming the blueprints we all have around it.

We realized that this is actually the most important thing to get in place for us to be really confident and successful in this area. During these days we learned a lot. We got a whole new view on the subject of money and our own (and other people’s) relationship to it. It totally changed how we look upon ourselves and how we look at money.

After the Millionaire Mind, we have learnt more about money and finances in other, different ways. Especially about creating and investing money. Having learnt the basics though, the psychology behind it have really helped us to understand and to take in all these other parts so much better.

To reinforce all that we got from this seminar, we all volunteered to crew a couple of months ago when the MMI for the first time was launched in Europe, in London.

With T Harv Eker at the Millionaire Mind in London 2009

It really gives everything a new dimension when you can be part of supporting other peoples learning.

Anyway, since it was extremely successful, they are now running the MMI a second time in Europe. It’s in London this time as well, on the 29-31 August 2009.

If you want to create a healthy platform for your financial future we really encourage you to take this opportunity to participate in these days. It doesn’t even have to cost you anything. To support people to raise their financial awareness they even give out a number of tickets for free! Check this out at www.millionaireminduk.com

Our friends from “Have Kids – Will Travel”, the Bartlett family, are inviting other families to join them for a 7 day family cruise in the Caribbean in January.
Sounds absolutely fantastic, doesn’t it? Just imagine taking some time off to join them and lots of other families and having the time to just relax, be together as a family and enjoy the sun, swimming and snorkelling in crystal clear waters, the company of other families, new adventures and create lots of happy memories together!

To us, family and travel is just the perfect combination. When you travel, you just let go of ell the everyday obligations and concerns and experience so many new things: new situations, new places, new people. You see and do things together, experiences that you will have in common and that will make you feel connected.

To travel as a family is just a fantastic way to strengthen your family bonds. And it’s fun! And you all learn so much!

Since the Bartlett’s are experts on inexpensive travel, they have managed to get a very good deal for this cruise. And, as they suggest themselves, why not take the opportunity to give your family the most fantastic Christmas gift (yes, we know, it’s a bit early to think about this now, but you may need some planning) instead of all the other stuff that probably doesn’t last that long anyway.

Why not give yourselves the ultimate holiday gift this year, a cruise in a fantastic location together with your whole family!

We’d sure love to be there ourselves and are looking into it at the moment.

As you can see from the invitation there will be some “Have Kids-Will Travel” seminars where you can learn more travel secrets.

And since many of the “Have Kids-Will Travel” readers and the Bartlett family themselves are homeschoolers we believe that this will be a great opportunity if you are interested in learning more on that subject as well.

Maybe this could even be the perfect opportunity to start you off in that new, independent, traveling lifestyle?

We have just created this amazing support program for anyone who really want to make their travel dream happen. During eight weeks we will take you from discovering your travel dream to actually having it all set up so you will be ready to go.

This first opportunity is on the 27th of October and is offered at a substatially reduced price. If you want to join us hurry up because it is already starting to fill up and spaces are limited...

To share from of our own traveling independent lifestyle and to encourage and support families (well, anybody) to act on their dreams of doing something different, like a longer journey, we offer two different talks, in Swedish or English: